Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, everybody.
[00:00:02] It's good to see you.
[00:00:05] I am Kirk, as Michael said, a pastor of operations here at Grace Church and School.
[00:00:10] What that means is people, buildings and finances. So all the, all the fun stuff we get to do here at Grace. But I'm glad you're here this morning as we wrap up our study in Ruth. This is the third week that we've been in the book of Ruth. Michael had week one and Max had week two. And I think we'll see a wonderful genealogical love story laid out today in Ruth. But before I start in the story of Ruth, and don't worry about if you missed the past two Sundays, don't worry. We'll do a quick little recap, get you caught up to speed, dig in a little deeper. But before I start that story, I want to share a story of my own. My wife and I actually, we got to experience graduation at the University of Texas at Austin. And before A and M&UT fans get excited, that's not why we were there. We were celebrating Bevin. We have a picture of Bevin. Bevan lived with us for four years while he was at high school here at Grace Community School. He came to us in 2018. We dropped him off in Austin in 2022, and he graduated last month. Great celebration. It was a wonderful experience. There he is. He's trying to do the hook em. He did do it later and it was just not in the photo that I captured, but it was a great celebration. In this next photo, you're going to see what I It was just an amazing thing for Kelly and I to experience. But on the left was Bevin's dad. Is Bevin's dad Raymond. It's the first time we got to meet face to face.
[00:01:34] We had done lots of virtual connections over the past eight years, but that's the first time we had met him face to face. It was just a joyous meeting for us. And then me and then my wife Kelly right there in the middle, and then Krista, who is doing hook em and then John. They were his, you call college parents, if you will. They were part of the bridges ministry there at ut and they welcomed him into their family and ministered to him while he was there. So it's a full circle moment for us that we got to meet Bevan when he was 14 and a freshman at Grace School and to see him and how well he did at University of Texas. The reason why I show that it's a little bit like the story that we're going to experience in Ruth.
[00:02:14] And even about five weeks ago, if some of you were here and you, you heard Megan and myself and we shared parts of our story. So this is story work, if you will, looking into the life of Ruth and examining that genealogical love story. And it's not lost on me that as I shared with you a few weeks ago, my story of my childhood had some things that were hard to reflect back to you all.
[00:02:44] An early childhood exposure to pornography, A life mired by sexual confusion and addiction. And this Sunday, I get to share a final chapter of a story of Ruth that is one of the most significant love stories in all of scripture. And what I mean by that is that my story is not just about me, just like Bevan's story is not just about him. When I shared my story, I mentioned my parents.
[00:03:09] What I did not say is that their story is rooted in their parents story and their story rooted in their parents.
[00:03:17] And on it goes. My parents and grandparents had some amazing things happen in their life. They also had setbacks. They had heartaches and pain.
[00:03:25] And the beauty of it is that Jesus showed up in the story. When my grandfather, my mom's dad passed away, she was introduced to Jesus, changed the trajectory of our entire family.
[00:03:38] We began to be exposed to what a life with Jesus began when mom gave her life to Jesus.
[00:03:45] God was at work in my family story long before I could see it.
[00:03:50] Just like he is at work. God is at work in Ruth's story.
[00:03:55] And just like he is at work in your story. This morning we're going to see the most breathtaking part of this story of Ruth.
[00:04:03] The part where God pulls back the curtain and we get to see together the genealogical love story that points straight to Jesus. Now for a quick little recap.
[00:04:16] Week one was tough.
[00:04:18] It was about grief, where we had heard. And we also heard that in the midst of that grief, it's okay for us to ask questions about what God is doing because we can know that he's ultimately working even when we have questions. Naomi loses everything. Her husband's, her sons. She is left in a foreign country with nothing and no one except a Moabite daughter in law named Ruth who refuses to leave her side.
[00:04:44] Week two, we saw that it was about redemption.
[00:04:47] Ruth and Naomi return to Bethlehem. Ruth goes to work in the fields just to survive.
[00:04:55] But God in his providence guides her to a field of a man named Boaz, a kinsman Redeemer.
[00:05:01] A man who sees her, honors her, chooses her.
[00:05:07] Max had us consider, consider the acronym joy. In week two, Jesus first, others next, and yourself last.
[00:05:17] On the surface, yes, it's a love story. Love story and a beautiful one. At a deeper level, it's something far greater today and this week, I hope that we see together the grander story of a loving God and his providence.
[00:05:31] So, more about this genealogy you heard in the passage that we read together. So I'm going to read it one more time if you don't mind hearing some beautiful names. Read again, but in verse 18.
[00:05:44] Now, these are the generations of Perez.
[00:05:47] Perez fathered Hezeron, Hezron fathered Ram, Ram fathered Amminadab, Amminadab fathered Nahshon, Nahshon fathered Salmon, Salmon fathered Boaz, Boaz fathered Obed, Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered David.
[00:06:06] A list of names is a powerful tool for us to understand. Not a tool, but powerful for us to understand how the Bible illustrate God's personal providence.
[00:06:18] Genealogy is important to God.
[00:06:21] Genealogies strengthen the supremacy of Scripture, confirm prophecy and reveal God's covenant faithfulness through the lives of his people.
[00:06:31] References to Ruth in the genealogical story. It mirrors what we'll eventually see in Matthew, chapter one, verses one through six.
[00:06:40] The book of Ruth ends with ten names, multiple generations.
[00:06:44] And by the time that you reach the last name on the list, you realize that God has been building something that none of these people in the story of Ruth could see from where they were standing.
[00:06:56] So in weeks one and two, Michael and Max both mentioned a Hebrew word, Hesed. It's fun to say because you can get it stuck in your throat, Hesed.
[00:07:05] So they mentioned it for a reason.
[00:07:07] It's in the story, it's weaved through the whole part of Ruth and the Old Testament. But this is what it looks like in the Hebrew lettering, though not really much for us to know right there, unless we know Hebrew. But Hebrew, it's a profound word in the Hebrew language used in the Bible that encompasses unconditional loyalty, steadfast love, grace and mercy. It goes beyond a feeling, describing a deep, action driven commitment to others, particularly within the context of a relationship or a covenant.
[00:07:43] I want us to sit in this beauty of Hesed just for a little bit, because I think it unlocks several things that we'll see as we go, because it's an important word. It's mentioned in the Old Testament 250 times and it means that loyal love, steadfast and a covenant faithfulness. Translators have struggled through the years to find a single English word, but it's not possible because of the Weight of the love and the loyalty and the mercy and action that is in hesed all at once.
[00:08:14] Here's what makes a difference.
[00:08:16] Hased is motivated by a prior commitment. A covenant stays true to a relationship even when the other person breaks it.
[00:08:25] Hesed rescues it, forgives it, provides it, protects. Because that's who God is.
[00:08:32] God. A God of Providence.
[00:08:35] John Piper, an author that I occasionally will encounter and read, especially in times of study, he describes Providence, God's Providence, this way. He describes it as a purposeful sovereignty.
[00:08:49] God has revealed his purposeful sovereignty over good and evil in order to humble human pride, intensify human worship, shatter human hopelessness, and put ballast in the battered boat of human faith, put steel in the spine of human courage and gladness, in the groans of affliction and love in the heart that sees no way forward.
[00:09:15] You see in that description of Providence that no matter what our circumstance or situation we find ourselves in, God is working all things together.
[00:09:24] Paul says it in Romans, all things work together for good, for those who love God.
[00:09:30] That is the story of Ruth. First grief, then redemption, a loyal love at work. Because God is always faithfully at work. Always.
[00:09:40] So I want to take an opportunity now to just look back so that we could look forward.
[00:09:46] And I want us to see something together. I'm going to tell a story before we settle into this final passage of Ruth. I want us to look one generation back.
[00:09:56] Not to Ruth, not to Bethlehem, but to a moment that had everything to do. Why this story ends the way it does, it is a little like what I shared about my story. I mentioned my parents and how their story runs to their parents and where we might see God's hand of Hesed.
[00:10:15] God was threading something through my family long before I could even know or had even arrived. Same thing here.
[00:10:22] That is what God's providence looks like. It starts somewhere where you would never expect someone, you would never choose and do something that would not make sense for generations.
[00:10:33] Imagine with me a doomed city, thick walls, a corrupt culture, judgment at the doorstep.
[00:10:44] And inside that city wall, a house with a woman society had probably written off, labeled for sure, maybe even disqualified from society.
[00:10:54] But she had heard something.
[00:10:56] She had heard rumors of a God that parts the sea and fights for his people.
[00:11:02] When two enemy spies knocked on her door, she makes a dangerous, radical choice.
[00:11:08] She hides them.
[00:11:10] She risks everything. And when they escape, they tell her to hang a scarlet cord from her window.
[00:11:17] They say, stay behind there. When the walls come down, you and your family will be rescued.
[00:11:23] She did not have A perfect past. She did not have a theological degree, but she had faith.
[00:11:29] A Hebrews 11 hall of Faith kind of faith.
[00:11:33] She tied the cord to the window and when the walls came crashing down, her house was the only thing left standing.
[00:11:41] You probably know by now her name is Rahab. A Canaanite woman. When Rahab was rescued from Jericho, she did not just survive, she was adopted into the family of God.
[00:11:53] A man named Salmon looked past her labels, saw her faith, loved her, and married her.
[00:12:00] Now imagine a little boy sitting in Rahab's lap, listening to her tell the story that scarlet cord learning what hesed looks like watching his father honor a woman that the world had rejected.
[00:12:17] Watching his mother live out a faith that cost her everything and saved her life.
[00:12:24] He grew up and became a wealthy landowner in Bethlehem. And as we've learned in this story of Ruth, his name is Boaz.
[00:12:31] So when a foreign widow knows named Ruth walks into a field, Boaz does not see a nuisance.
[00:12:38] He sees something he grew up watching the faith of an outsider who has everything to lose and still chooses to trust God.
[00:12:48] Rahab's hesed became Salmon's hesed. Salmon's hesed became Boaz's hesed.
[00:12:56] God was always at work. Long before Naomi lost her family, long before Ruth stepped into Bethlehem, God was preparing a Redeemer in the home of a rescue woman named Rahab.
[00:13:09] Let's look at this piece of scripture one more time and see the covenant faithfulness in the passage in a little more detail of a story leading Ruth to David and then to Jesus.
[00:13:24] So, Ruth 4, I'm going to back up to 11 again. If you want to follow along.
[00:13:31] Then all the people who were at the gate and the elders said, we are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel.
[00:13:44] May you act worthily in Ephraim and be renowned in Bethlehem. And may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah because of your offspring that the Lord will give you this young woman.
[00:14:03] So this son that she is giving ends up in Naomi's lap. She became his nurse and the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying his son would be Obed.
[00:14:15] Obed would father Jesse and he would father David.
[00:14:19] Now just a word here. That Naomi is holding her grandchild in her lap. And that joy, because I am a grandparent, I'm going to interject here the greater joy when she thought she lost her entire family. Can you imagine the joy that she's experiencing in this moment. That's hesed. That runs through this story and it runs through yours. The Book of Ruth is a story of covenant faithfulness, ordinary obedience, ordinary faithfulness, powerfully used by God, all pointing to Jesus the greater Boaz, the ultimate kinsman, redeemer.
[00:14:54] I want to show you where Hesed shows up a few times here in this passage.
[00:15:00] God's faithfulness does not wait, wait. Hesed is present when everything falls apart. Excuse me.
[00:15:07] God's faithfulness does not wait for circumstances to get better.
[00:15:11] It is present when circumstances are broken.
[00:15:15] Look at where this story starts. Three funerals, no money, no plan. Naomi is hollowed out by grief that she tells people to stop calling her by her name, Naomi, which means pleasant, and start calling her Mara, which means bitter.
[00:15:33] She gave up on her own name.
[00:15:36] And right there, in the moment of total collapse, collapse. Ruth makes a decision that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with loyalty.
[00:15:45] You are not getting rid of me, Ruth says. Where you go, I go. Your people are my people. Your God is going to be my God.
[00:15:55] Where did Ruth learn that kind of love? She was a Moabite.
[00:15:59] Covenant loyalty was not in her cultural vocabulary, but she watched Naomi live it. Naomi had seen it in Boaz's family. Boaz has learned it sitting in the lap of a woman named Rahab, who tied the scarlet cord to the window and bet everything a God she barely knew.
[00:16:17] Hesed is contagious.
[00:16:20] It reaches across generations. It gets passed down, it gets caught before it's ever taught.
[00:16:29] And here is the greater picture. Jesus did not wait for us to get ourselves together.
[00:16:37] He showed up. He entered into darkness in the moment of human history, bound himself to a people who had little to offer. And he said he wasn't leaving.
[00:16:46] That is the ultimate hesed.
[00:16:48] That is the love that started a generational chain that we are part of second place. Where hased shows up, Hesed goes further than it has to.
[00:16:59] Ruth ends up in a field.
[00:17:01] And the text says she happened to end up in Boaz's field. I love the word happen. Just happened to. From Ruth's perspective, it might have been chance.
[00:17:11] From God's perspective, it was the plan.
[00:17:15] Boaz sees her and immediately asked who she is.
[00:17:19] When he finds out she is the Moabite who came back with Naomi, something just clicks.
[00:17:25] Boaz knows what it means to be an outsider. Who got brought in.
[00:17:31] His mother was that woman.
[00:17:33] Boaz does not do just the minimum.
[00:17:37] The law said leave edges of the field with grain for the poor.
[00:17:42] Boaz tells his workers to deliberately drop extra grain in her path. He invites her to his table. He makes sure she is protected.
[00:17:51] Ruth is stunned by it. She asks him, why is he being so kind to her? She's a foreigner.
[00:17:58] Boaz says has heard about every. He had said that he had heard everything about her and Naomi, about her loyalty. And he says to her, may you find refuge in God's wings.
[00:18:11] He lived out God's love faithfully because that's where he grew up, in a house rooted in it.
[00:18:18] Rahab showed extravagant generosity to two strangers on a rooftop. Boaz showed it to a widow in a wheat field.
[00:18:26] The generational thread keeps moving.
[00:18:30] Jesus is the same way.
[00:18:32] There are no scraps of grace for us.
[00:18:35] He does not just give enough grace to get us by. We see in Psalm 23, David says that the Lord prepared a table for him right in in front of his enemies and that his cup overflows.
[00:18:50] We should be just as stunned as Ruth was. Why are you being this kind to me? The answer, his hesed.
[00:19:00] Third place, chesed shows up.
[00:19:03] Hesed is bigger than you can see right now.
[00:19:07] The genealogy. A list of names. Perez, Hezron, Hezeroth, fathered Ram. And it goes on multiple generations until you land on David.
[00:19:16] And where does that lead us? In the Scriptures, you know where David, his line leads.
[00:19:21] It leads to a manger in Bethlehem, a carpenter's son, a cross and an empty tomb.
[00:19:29] The genealogy allows us to see what God was doing, how far back this goes to see that nothing was wasted.
[00:19:38] Rahab's faith in Jericho, Salmon's willingness to love an outsider. The hesed poured into a boy named Boaz.
[00:19:45] Boaz's generosity to a grieving widow.
[00:19:48] Ruth's radical loyalty to a bitter woman with nothing to offer.
[00:19:53] Every day, ordinary faithful moments that God was collecting, weaving them together, building something none of them could see.
[00:20:04] Naomi thought that God had forgotten her. But the book ends with her holding a baby boy on her lap while her neighbors celebrate.
[00:20:13] That baby was Obed. Obed was the father of Jesse. Jesse fathered David. But she had no idea.
[00:20:19] And here is what we need to hear this morning. This is what I need to hear this morning. We have no idea either. We don't know what God is building through our ordinary faithfulness right now.
[00:20:30] We do not know who is watching us choose loyalty when loyalty is costly.
[00:20:34] We do not know whose Boaz we are raising right now.
[00:20:38] And we can know that our current chapter is not our final chapter.
[00:20:43] God is still writing. His loyal love reaches across every generation. All the way to the cross, all the way to the empty tomb for victory over death.
[00:20:52] So, as we wind down toward the end, here I have an invitation with three parts.
[00:21:00] This invitation is for all of us, certainly for me.
[00:21:04] We have watched God work through a woman hiding, spies on the roof, grieving widow, a foreign woman gleaning field, a wealthy farmer, and 10 generations of names that sometimes are hard to pronounce.
[00:21:14] Ordinary people that had no idea what God was building. And now we're in the story, not just as spectators, but we have the opportunity to be active participants. The same covenant faithfulness that ran through Rahab, Salmon and Boaz and Ruth, available to us not because we have earned it, not because we have it all together, but because that's who God is, a God of loving kindness and rest.
[00:21:42] Jesus is the one. The whole genealogy is pointing toward inviting us to join him and rest in his loving kindness.
[00:21:52] Listen to Jesus in these words, in this invitation.
[00:21:57] Come to me.
[00:21:58] Get away with me and you will recover your life.
[00:22:02] I'll show you how to take a real rest.
[00:22:04] Walk with me, work with me, watch how I do it.
[00:22:09] Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly.
[00:22:22] That is the voice of the ultimate kinsman, Redeemer.
[00:22:25] Hesed with a face, hesed with a name. And his name is Jesus, inviting you into his loving kindness and rest.
[00:22:34] So the first part of the invitation is you can receive this.
[00:22:38] Maybe you came here this morning carrying something heavy. Bitterness like Naomi, grief like Ruth. A past that you might be convinced that disqualifies you.
[00:22:49] Like Rahab.
[00:22:51] You can know this. God has never once chosen the people the world would choose.
[00:22:57] He chose a woman hiding spies, a foreign widow with nothing to offer, broken, ordinary, unlikely people woven into the greatest love story ever told. He is choosing us now.
[00:23:10] You don't have to clean yourself up first.
[00:23:13] You don't have to resolve the bitterness.
[00:23:15] Just come.
[00:23:17] That is all that Ruth did. She showed up in the field Hesed, met her there.
[00:23:23] If you are weary of striving, exhausted from performing, worn down from trying to hold everything together, this is the invitation.
[00:23:34] You can come and receive it. And here's why.
[00:23:37] God uses ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary, ordinary and eternal purposes. And that includes you and me.
[00:23:46] Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life.
[00:23:51] Next. Once you receive it, you can actually live it.
[00:23:55] Here's what that looks like, practically.
[00:23:57] Ruth gleaning, Boaz dropping Extra grain, Rahab tying a scarlet cord. Nothing glamorous, not impressive. Most of the time, nobody's actually even watching.
[00:24:09] Nobody's taking notes. But God is sovereign over every one of those faithful moments again, weaving them together, building something we will not be able to see from where we are standing.
[00:24:20] Practice ordinary faithfulness. Be loyal when loyalty is costly. Be generous beyond what is required. Stay committed to the people God has placed in your life, even when it's inconvenient.
[00:24:32] Because we have no idea who is watching us. We have no idea who who Boaz we are raising right now.
[00:24:40] And as we live it, we can realize something. I know I had to learn this a very hard way.
[00:24:47] But Jesus is already the hero of this story. We don't have to be the hero of this story. We just have to be faithful.
[00:24:56] Walk with me, work with me. Watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
[00:25:03] Next, in this invitation, we can find rest.
[00:25:07] This is the one that I think I find to be the biggest struggle. I don't know about you, but we're wired to strive. We want to see the whole genealogy before we trust the process.
[00:25:19] We want to know how chapter one connects to chapter four before we're ever willing to step into chapter two. But Rahab did not know.
[00:25:28] Naomi did not know.
[00:25:30] Ruth did not know. They just tied the cord. They gleamed. They kept showing up in ordinary moments of faith.
[00:25:38] God was building something breathtaking the whole time.
[00:25:43] We don't have to figure out how our story ends. We don't have to manufacture significance or force the outcome or strive for a legacy.
[00:25:52] Jesus has already secured your rescue. He's secured my rescue.
[00:25:57] The genealogy is already written. Your name, your ordinary, unlikely, beautiful name is already known by God, who has been weaving the story since before you were born because you were created in his image.
[00:26:12] So finally, in this invitation, we can live freely in his covenant faithfulness. We can work, we can give, and we can love out of his strength and not our own.
[00:26:23] I will show you how to take a real rest.
[00:26:26] Jesus says so. I hope that that hesed is meaningful to you as we walk through this story of Ruth. I want to come back and end with this story of Bevin for two reasons, as you'll see in this picture, one more time of Raymond and us, if that can come up. There is that. Kelly and I, when we made this decision, our youngest said just gone off to college.
[00:26:54] We were empty nesters. And we made the decision to say yes to hosting a student from Beijing. We had no idea how we would react. We had no idea how Bevan would react. We had no idea how our entire family would react. But four years we committed to doing this, and it was life changing for us.
[00:27:11] But more so when we heard the story of Bevan as we were getting to know him, that we later learned that Raymond and his wife Grace became believers back in 2005.
[00:27:22] So they began a life with Jesus. And in 2011, they had made a decision that they wanted to send their son to America to get a Christian education.
[00:27:30] And that included coming to Grace.
[00:27:33] So Bevan, as best he could with his, you know, beginning to have better English. It was good, but it was a little broken. But he began to tell us through pictures on his laptop, and he came across one where he was the center his family was gathered around. The other family members were gathered around from the school where he attended where they had decided to come and make the decision to come. And Bevan said, we're praying right here for the family that would eventually be hosting him while he was at Grace. And that was in 2011. And so Kelly and I just, jaws dropped, going, wow, that is amazing how God allowed us to see that. So as we walked in faith, we kept in touch after we dropped Bevin off in Austin, got to celebrate with him in graduation.
[00:28:15] But then we learned in our conversation that Bevan and his dad, Raymond, the very next day from this ceremony, they were flying to Washington, D.C. to be part of a church planting network that their family was going to begin to learn what it would be like to plant a church in Montreal, Canada, where they were now living.
[00:28:35] So full circle moment for us, yes, celebrating his graduation, but the continuing thread of what God was doing in their family's life that will change their family and their generations to come through their family and a decision for Jesus, it impacted us in a big way.
[00:28:50] I know it impacted the many people that we got to interact and share that with.
[00:28:55] So you never know the covenant faithfulness that God has through us. And I hope you enjoy the Word has said as you go from here. So we're going to transition into a time of communion. So I hope that you got the bread and the cup as you walked in. Did anybody not get one?
[00:29:12] Okay, I'm glad that you got one. So we're going to have a time of communion in quiet to yourselves as they play some music. And so just tying this together is that where hesed becomes flesh and blood.
[00:29:30] We've been sitting inside the story of hesed these past three weeks that we see a loyal love that shows up in the dark a generous love that goes from further than it has to but the sovereign love of God is writing something bigger than any of us can see this morning in this communion moment we're sitting at the table because the greater boaz Jesus did not just drop extra grain he gave his body he did not just invite us to eat at his table he became the meal the bread we were about we hold in our hands and we're about to take is the broken body of Jesus given freely for people who had nothing to offer him.
[00:30:11] The cup is his blood poured out as the final permanent act of hesed the covenant was sealed not with a scarlet cord in the window but with a cross on a hill and an empty tomb the table is the fulfillment of hesed so as you have this quiet moment with yourself take your time take the bread take the cup and then as we have a moment to join together in worship we can praise him together as we sing.
